Cedar wood oil has long been employed for various products, particularly cosmetic products and perfumes. With the ever increasing popularity of these products and the development of new products in these fields, the demand for high quality cedar wood oil continues to climb.
In spite of this increased demand and the large quantity of cedar wood available for use by manufacturers, the production of cedar wood oil has not kept up with the demand and the expense of obtaining the cedar wood oil has not been made more efficient. These drawbacks are principally due to the methods used to remove the cedar wood oil from the base material.
The sole production method being employed in the industry to obtain cedar wood oil from cedar tree pulp is steam distillation. Although various attempts have been made to improve the steam distillation process, the process has remained substantially the same for decades, with its numerous drawbacks and inefficiencies remaining intact.
In particular, the use of steam distillation is extremely expensive due to the requirement that large of quantities of steam must be generated and forced through the cedar wood pulp in order to extract the desired oil therefrom. This removal or distillation process is extremely time consuming with about twenty hours being required to obtain a recovery of about 2% cedar wood oil.
In addition to the high cost for meeting the requirement that steam be continuously forced through the batch of cedar wood pulp, the prior art methods also suffer from the inherent problems encountered by channeling. Typically, the steam develops specific flow paths as the steam is initially forced through the cedar wood pulp, and these flow paths are repeatedly followed by the subsequent steam flow, instead of extending through the entire reservoir of cedar wood pulp. As a result, the process is inefficient in using the expensive steam to extract larger quantities of cedar wood oil since the entire batch is not efficiently processed, unless specific steps are taken to eliminate chaneling.
Furthermore, additional problems typically encountered with steam distillation of cedar wood oil are severe pollution problems whereby caustic or harmful smoke and/or grease are given off to the environment through smoke stacks, even though every effort is made to eliminate these unwanted environmental hazards.
Therefore, it is a principal object of the present invention to provide a process for removing cedar wood oil from the cedar wood pulp in a more efficient, less time consuming method.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a process for removing cedar wood oil from cedar wood pulp having the characteristic features described above which can be easily employed in all process facilities, even facilities presently using steam distillation.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a process for removing cedar wood oil from cedar wood pulp having the characteristic features described above which substantially reduces the manufacturing expense of the final product.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a method for removing cedar wood oil from cedar wood pulp having the characteristic features described above which is capable of providing a higher quality product with substantially less energy costs.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a process for removing cedar wood oil from cedar wood pulp having the characteristic features described above which substantially eliminates all of the pollution problems inherent in steam distillation methods.
Other and more specific objects will in part be obvious and will in part appear hereinafter.